Investigations of a Dog

It’s probably common knowledge by now that Mercurius Rusticus wrote a post which was very hostile towards gender history and female historians but which didn’t include any detailed evidence to back up the vague assertions that gender history has little or no value. I read it this morning but since then it’s disappeared. Ralph Luker at Cliopatria linked to some responses and Sharon Howard at Early Modern Notes has also responded since then. And this is my (possibly quite predictable) response.

I think gender history is important but I still agonized a bit before deciding to write this post. That’s partly because I wondered if it might just be pointless preaching to the converted (more on that later), but mostly because of the dilemma that affects every man who is committed to feminism. Can a man be a feminist? Am I in danger of appropriating something that rightfully belongs to women? Is it patronising for a man to intervene on behalf of women? Judging by the responses that Ralph Luker linked to, the sisters are doing alright for themselves. They really don’t need me to come in and save them.

But the point I want to make is this: gender isn’t just about women. It affects everyone. Patriarchy oppresses pretty much all women, but it also oppresses many men, a point made by Anthony Fletcher and Alexandra Shepard in their studies of early-modern gender. I’m not getting into any men’s movement bullshit here about men being oppressed by feminists. It’s all about the patriarchy, and men who feel oppressed should be uniting with feminists against patriarchy, not uniting with patriarchy against feminists.

So I do have to respond, but judging by previous experience it might not change anyone’s mind about anything. This isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with this situation. Earlier this year Oxoniensis wrote a very similar post. Although I left a comment disagreeing with it, I can’t find the post now so I assume it’s been deleted. The reply to my comment made me realise that there are incommensurable differences here. Some people just don’t want to admit that gender is important, but to me and anyone else sympathetic to feminism that just proves that feminism is needed. If people can be so blind to gender ideology we need to work harder to expose it. But it seems like a debate between these two positions is going to be very difficult.

I set out my position on gender reasonably well in the conclusion to my recent Social-Political Animals paper (certainly better than I managed in my response to Oxoniensis). I think gender is very important, but that it shouldn’t be privileged to the exclusion of other aspects of human identities because we need to see how these things interact with each other. I got that insight from Alexandra Shepard’s recent book on early-modern masculinity, so clearly female gender historians aren’t over privileging gender. In my opinion there still isn’t enough gender history. We need to integrate it better with other aspects of history. That’s an opportunity, not a threat.

Finally, here is a small selection of what I consider to be some particularly good works on gender history (and see also my post on Goldstein’s War and Gender):

1. Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (Routledge: London, 1993).
2. Anthony J Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1995).
3. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
4. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
5. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).
6. Dror Wahrman, ‘Percy’s prologue’, Past and Present, 159 (1998), pp. 113-60.

[Edit: I removed these posts in the summer of 2008 because I didn't want to feed the troll and just wanted to forget that he existed. Now (July 2009) I think that was a bad decision, because I have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of here. We were right and he was wrong. He being Rusticus and Oxoniensis, who were almost certainly the same person.]